Thursday, July 01, 2004

Forget Jastrow, here's the real thing

According to the London Times, "Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, has sparked a new craze in the southern Indian state of Kerala: a rush to learn Aramaic, the ancient, fast-disappearing language of Biblical times. Within weeks of the film’s release Kerala’s institutes for the study of Aramaic were deluged by calls."
Apparently, Aramaic "has lived on in Kerala as the liturgical language of the eastern churches, taken there by ancient settlers. In Kerala it is no longer routinely taught to all Christians but is spoken by a few hundred priests, nuns and monks and intoned to congregations from the church altar."
The article notes that "Only half a million people worldwide speak Aramaic at home, mostly in the Assyrian Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon."
Only??? That's half a million people more than I expected!

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